This is why you don’t see sensational horror stories about new drugs on this blog:

By now you probably have heard that krokodil, a nasty homemade version of the narcotic painkiller desomorphine, is starting to catch on in the United States. Having eaten its way through the flesh of myriad Russian opiate addicts, the caustic concoction—notorious for the ghastly side effects caused by its corrosive contaminants, including abscesses and gangrene—is reportedly burning its way through Arizona, Texas, Nevada, Utah, Oklahoma, Colorado, Illinois, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. “The monster has crossed the ocean,” Time declared last month.

Like most monster stories, this tale of what CNN calls a “flesh-eating zombie drug” stalking the land does not appear to be true, as some reporters have begun to recognize. Yet others continue to hype an American krokodil craze that seems to exist only in the fevered imaginations of anti-drug propagandists and their journalistic accomplices. Just last week the Associated Press claimed doctors had confirmed that a Texas teenager’s skin lesions were caused by krokodil, and on Tuesday police in Lamar, Colorado,told reporters the drug had shown up there.

“A lot of people want to call it a trend, but we’re not seeing it,” says Joseph Moses, a spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).